Qualcomm ships ARM chip to challenge Intel in cloud data centers

Qualcomm's much-anticipated ARM-based Centriq 2400 product line, which started shipping commercially this week, is a worthy contender to break Intel's virtual monopoly in the server processor arena, where data center operators are thirsting to see competition to help bring down costs.An unsolicited acquisition bid for Qualcomm from Broadcom, emerging server-chip competitors and legal wrangles involving Apple and other vendors, however, cast a bit of a shadow on prospects for the new chip.Qualcomm revealed some impressive specs at an industry event in San Diego Wednesday, bringing out a a variety of big-time cloud, hardware and software providers to show support.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE Developing its Own Low Power “Neural Network” Chips

With so many chip startups targeting the future of deep learning training and inference, one might expect it would be far easier for tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy versus build. However, when it comes to select applications at the extreme edge (for space missions in particular), nothing in the ecosystem fits the bill.

In the context of a broader discussion about the company’s Extreme Edge program focused on space-bound systems, HPE’s Dr. Tom Bradicich, VP and GM of Servers, Converged Edge, and IoT systems, described a future chip that would be ideally suited for high performance computing under …

HPE Developing its Own Low Power “Neural Network” Chips was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: How blockchain technology could affect the future of network engineering

Blockchain, also referred to as distributed ledger, is the concept behind the success of Bitcoin and provides a dynamic digital register of transactions. Think of it as a database that’s distributed throughout a network. Information is continually shared and reconciled throughout multiple nodes and each one has an identical copy of the database. Transactions within this database are audited and agreed upon by consensus. This decentralized method of keeping track of changes ensures the ledger can’t be practically controlled by any one entity, eliminates the possibility of single-points of failure, and allows for the verification of transactions without the need for third-party intervention. Since each interaction is public, blockchain technology offers a reliable, incorruptible transaction-based infrastructure and the value it provides isn’t just limited to cryptocurrency.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How blockchain technology could affect the future of network engineering

Blockchain, also referred to as distributed ledger, is the concept behind the success of Bitcoin and provides a dynamic digital register of transactions. Think of it as a database that’s distributed throughout a network. Information is continually shared and reconciled throughout multiple nodes and each one has an identical copy of the database. Transactions within this database are audited and agreed upon by consensus. This decentralized method of keeping track of changes ensures the ledger can’t be practically controlled by any one entity, eliminates the possibility of single-points of failure, and allows for the verification of transactions without the need for third-party intervention. Since each interaction is public, blockchain technology offers a reliable, incorruptible transaction-based infrastructure and the value it provides isn’t just limited to cryptocurrency.To read this article in full, please click here

HPC Heavyweight Goes All-In On OpenACC

Across the HPC community, commercial firms, government labs and academic institutions are adapting their code to embrace GPU architectures. They are motivated by the faster performance and lower energy consumption provided by GPUs, and many of them are using OpenACC to annotate their code and make it GPU-friendly. The Next Platform recently interviewed one key organization to learn why it is using the OpenACC programming model to expand its computing capabilities and platform support.

If the earth was the size of a basketball, its atmosphere would be the thickness of shrink wrap. It is fragile enough that in 1960, the …

HPC Heavyweight Goes All-In On OpenACC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nutanix Expands Adds Breadth to Cloud Platform

Nutanix has been on a journey for well over a year to transform itself from a supplier for software for hyperconverged infrastructure to a company with a platform that allows enterprises to build private datacenter environments that give them the same kinds of tools, automation, agility, scalability and consumption options that they can find in public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Nutanix was one of several vendors whose software helped propel the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure space through partnerships with such top-tier system OEMs like Dell EMC, IBM and Lenovo, and is among the last independent companies standing, …

Nutanix Expands Adds Breadth to Cloud Platform was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

HPE refreshes its Superdome servers with SGI technology

Can two old technologies make it in the brave new world of cloud computing? Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) thinks yes with its updates to the Superdome servers featuring its recently acquired SGI technology.HPE bought SGI in late 2016, ending for good the name and company that was once a Hollywood darling. The company enjoyed almost celebrity status around 1993 when its computers were credited for creating the realistic dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up After that, though, it fell on hard times as the environment zigged and poor management zagged, blowing one opportunity after another. In 2009, Rackable Systems acquired SGI’s assets and changed its name to SGI because it thought there was some value in the name — for some inexplicable reason.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE refreshes its Superdome servers with SGI technology

Can two old technologies make it in the brave new world of cloud computing? Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) thinks yes with its updates to the Superdome servers featuring its recently acquired SGI technology.HPE bought SGI in late 2016, ending for good the name and company that was once a Hollywood darling. The company enjoyed almost celebrity status around 1993 when its computers were credited for creating the realistic dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up After that, though, it fell on hard times as the environment zigged and poor management zagged, blowing one opportunity after another. In 2009, Rackable Systems acquired SGI’s assets and changed its name to SGI because it thought there was some value in the name — for some inexplicable reason.To read this article in full, please click here

Privacy Pass – “The Math”

Privacy Pass - “The Math”

This is a guest post by Alex Davidson, a PhD student in Cryptography at Royal Holloway, University of London, who is part of the team that developed Privacy Pass. Alex worked at Cloudflare for the summer on deploying Privacy Pass on the Cloudflare network.

During a recent internship at Cloudflare, I had the chance to help integrate support for improving the accessibility of websites that are protected by the Cloudflare edge network. Specifically, I helped develop an open-source browser extension named ‘Privacy Pass’ and added support for the Privacy Pass protocol within Cloudflare infrastructure. Currently, Privacy Pass works with the Cloudflare edge to help honest users to reduce the number of Cloudflare CAPTCHA pages that they see when browsing the web. However, the operation of Privacy Pass is not limited to the Cloudflare use-case and we envisage that it has applications over a wider and more diverse range of applications as support grows.

In summary, this browser extension allows a user to generate cryptographically ‘blinded’ tokens that can then be signed by supporting servers following some receipt of authenticity (e.g. a CAPTCHA solution). The browser extension can then use these tokens to ‘prove’ honesty in future communications with the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Fixing the Plumbing

At LinkedIn, we pay attention to site speed at every step of the release process, from code development to production ramp. But inevitably, the performance of our pages degrades over time (we use the word “pages” to denote webpages as well as mobile apps). In this post, we go over the tools and processes we use to catch and fix these degradations. While this is a post about automation to identify latency leaks, it is also a tale of how a human touch is still necessary. –Ritesh Maheshwari @ LinkedIn

Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass

Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass

Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass

Enabling anonymous access to the web with privacy-preserving cryptography

Cloudflare supports Privacy Pass, a recently-announced privacy-preserving protocol developed in collaboration with researchers from Royal Holloway and the University of Waterloo. Privacy Pass leverages an idea from cryptography — zero-knowledge proofs — to let users prove their identity across multiple sites anonymously without enabling tracking. Users can now use the Privacy Pass browser extension to reduce the number of challenge pages presented by Cloudflare. We are happy to support this protocol and believe that it will help improve the browsing experience for some of the Internet’s least privileged users.

The Privacy Pass extension is available for both Chrome and Firefox. When people use anonymity services or shared IPs, it makes it more difficult for website protection services like Cloudflare to identify their requests as coming from legitimate users and not bots. Privacy Pass helps reduce the friction for these users—which include some of the most vulnerable users online—by providing them a way to prove that they are a human across multiple sites on the Cloudflare network. This is done without revealing their identity, and without exposing Cloudflare customers to additional threats from malicious bots. As the first service to support Privacy Continue reading

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